Facebook ads work if you’re trying to build a community, and want to reach people in adjacent interest areas: you like comics and frogs, why not come check out Amphibimen Comics on Facebook? (Yes, that’s a project of mine and Erik Nielsen’s). There’s no exhortation to buy a product. There’s no attempt to create need. That’s the “old” model for advertising, and the likelihood of someone clicking through on an ad to find out more about a product is probably less than them clicking on an application that promises a free iPad (as Facebook spam application vectors have shown).

Facebook ads move your interest from the head of the product curve to a spot somewhere under the long tail. They are the “push” that Chris Andersen describes as necessary for his model to work. In my limited experience with Facebook ads, I found that a budget of about $10 a day added a few new users to our fan base each day that the ad ran. My cost of acquiring an interested set of eyeballs? Probably $2 a user. That’s significantly better than direct mail, and I have better demographics, insights and consumption data than I would through a print advertisement.

So the sturm und drang about Facebook’s revenue model collapsing prefaced by GM’s move back to the classic consumer reach zone is way overblown. It’s the small businesses that can benefit. It’s the several million companies that make, distribute and connect you to things you will love, once you discover them, that should be thinking about Facebook ads — and not to point you to a website. The ads should take you to a Facebook page. To a place where you can find out how others are using the product, or why they like it better than something in the head of the distribution curve. Those ads build your community; users in the community will figure out how to become purchasers (if they clicked on an ad, liked a page, and read through some content, it’s a safe bet they can follow a URL on your Facebook page to buy the product).

Facebook ads aren’t only about the long tail; they are a long tail market themselves. Who needs GM when you can get 3,000 small businesses to spend $10 a day – it’s $10 million no matter how you bit-slice it.

Where do you start being proud of this team, as a fan? Playing hard every shift, consistently sticking to a system? Avoiding retaliatory penalties, even when Rinaldo, Giroux and Simmonds were dirtier than the bathroom in a South Street Philadelphia bar at three in the morning (they’ll have plenty of time to verify my comparison now). Marty not being at all fazed playing the puck, even under pressure? Stephen Gionta hitting about a foot larger than he stands? Kovulchuk’s power play goal, coming from Zubrus winning a monster faceoff in the zone? Even JR gave Kovy props in the post-game.

It starts behind the bench, with DeBoer retaining his composure through every situation. Compare him to Tortorella, who must be nursing a sore throat by the midway point of most games, or Laviolette, who pouts, frowns and gesticulates like he’s a marionette whose strings are wrapped around a drill bit. Up and down the coaching staff, you can see the development of the younger plays, the poise that the playoff newbies have exuded, and how every player focuses on every small detail.

This team is fun to watch. And we get to watch for at least another round of playoffs.

1. They do the little things. Clarkson’s Game 2-winning goal doesn’t happen if Elias doesn’t poke-check the puck away from his man on the half-boards. It’s not on the scoresheet, but that play turned a Flyers breakout into a goal-scoring chance for the Devils. Elias, Greene and Henrique have been executing the small area game very well.

2. Bryzgalov lost the nerves contest. Bryz started looking shaky handling a puck in front of the net, and shortly after that Larsson went top shelf on him; a few bouncing pucks didn’t take Larsson off his game. I don’t think the Rock needs to filled with fans wearing bear masks or carrying boxes from Build-A-Bear Workshop (although that would be really funny), but keeping Bryzgalov thinking is to the Devils’ advantage. Philadelphia can’t put their other Bob-lehead in net; the Devils owned him this season.

3. Matching lines and hitting hard works. Briere was -3 in Game 2, mostly because Larsson and Volchenkov, along with Henrique’s line, were pounding him and Giroux with regularity. The fact that Wayne Simmonds went flat-line stupid at the end of Game 2 indicates that frustrations are high.

4. The fourth line has stepped up. When you can roll four lines your top two lines are more productive. And the Devils’ fourth line has been outstanding through the playoffs.

5. You add by subtracting a negative. Kovulchuk wasn’t at his regular performance level, and finally resolving his status make everyone else’s job more clear. The Devils have shown they can stick to a system and work through adversity.

What else do I want? I’d like Sherry Ross to stop making inane comments and then repeating them ad nauseum. I’d like the NBC commentators to listen to Doc Emrick to hear how play by play can flow beautifully without comments that sound like Ross cast-offs. I’d like to understand how an obstruction penalty can be called after the horn has sounded (end of Period 2, Game 2) when there’s no movement in on-going play with which to interfere. And I’d like Bryce Salvador to score another goal.

The real answer (in my network-centric view of the world) is that Instagram is worth a billion dollars, a re-filed S1 and pre-roadshow signal to noise diffusion because it makes Facebook’s advertising platform more valuable through increased context. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then context about a photo is probably good for a few Gbytes in a map/reduce job.

What can you learn through Instagram? Where I take pictures. Who I share them with, who follows me and who I follow (perhaps shedding light on not just subject but style and composition). How I color-adjust the pictures provides more clues – am I nostalgic (sepia tones, black and white) or having fun (color over-saturation)? Know who is in the pictures, and where they were taken, and there’s significant weighting inferred for the edges in my page, group and friend social graphs. The data available to advertising campaign management is increasingly rich and timely — if your business depends on campaign generation, then creating richer campaign marketing data is nominally a high return investment.

I’ll be blunt: Facebook can do with Instagram what Yahoo! might have done with Flickr. It’s not about the content, it’s about what the content construction and conversation tells you.

So yeah, I can see why Facebook would spend a billion dollars on Instagram. Andy Balo (Kickstarter principal) provides some other metrics for measuring how far a billion dollars goes, but they’re all trailing indicators. An incremental $40 million in advertising revenues puts $1 billion of market cap back into a company that will be (supposedly) trading for roughly 25x annual sales post-IPO. That’s a leading indicator.

Maybe I’m being way too optimistic, but if Facebook can trawl through my Instagram photo data, then perhaps I’ll stop seeing ads that offer dental insurance to employees of a former employer.

The Devils lost as a team, just as they did in the Game 3 disaster. The question is: do the Devils have the team work and the individual accountability, and those things in the right proportions and blends, to win two games in a row, and make a playoff run that doesn’t end with a May Day call? As players, coaches, and trainers, when you look in the mirror, before, during or after Game 6 and (hopefully) Game 7, please make sure you can honestly say that you’re delivering on your end of the experiences we expect, we demand, and we hope for as your fans.

I had hoped, entering this season, that it would be a neat bookend to the first year in which Ben and were season ticket holders – the 99-00 Cup run, the first year he played ice hockey. In this last year regularly sitting next to me at dinner, on the couch and at games, I’ve probably over-rotated on high expectations, facing a shortly empty nest. But at the same time, sports memories from our last year in high school sit on the saddle point of experience. They are the net summation of people, places and things chosen for us by older family members, and the first events we can pick through given the independence of spending money, a driver’s license and formal adulthood.

Baseball had diminished interest for me in 1979 until my first sports hero Willie Stargell led his Pittsburgh Pirates to the World Series as I wrestled with college applications and parallel parking. Stargell united a diverse group of players; the “We Are Family” soundtrack to their pennant run wasn’t just a media post-production effect. They came together as a team, played as a team, and won as a team. Everyone did their part. Just a few months after he died in 2001, I had the opportunity to pick a jersey number of my own and I remembered my fondness for all things related to first baseman, number 8, Willie Stargell. The twin circles on my back are a continuous refresh of those memories that illustrated sportsmanship, leadership, bridging differences and taking personal responsibility for winning.

There are lifetimes of memories waiting to be created – for our families, for the Devils team’s families, for fans and potential fans across the Garden State – and two games in which to make them.

I watched my first episode of Eureka in broadcast time tonight, complete with commercial breaks highly useful for checking Twitter #eureka updates. I’ve seen every episode of the first four seasons on iTunes in compressed time (both without commercials and without a week to digest each new plot twist).

As the opener unfolded, the “it’s all been done” chimes tolled: evil robots, villains in refrain, time travel, loves lived and lost (very Frank Sinatra), James Bond like races to save the (Felicia) day and Carter’s Jeep getting destroyed. You knew that the episode wasn’t that hackneyed, not from a show that has pushed science fiction equally along the mainstream and nerd axes of content. And it wasn’t – and it was more creative than the composition of all of the quickly dismissed pseudo-themes.

It was worth waiting through the winter.

The other stories are quite good as well, and represent a who’s who of writers — Ellen Klages, Alastair Reynolds, Nancy Kress being just three of the thirteen represented in the collection. Klages’ writing in particular sits on the boundary of real and imagined, present and potential future; her inclusion makes the overall narrative that much more rich and made me go looking for my copy of her Portable Childhoods.

At about $1.50 per story “Life on Mars: The New Frontier” is rich in value and variety.

Rather than a linear chronology, Bruford takes a simple idea – What do musicians do during the day, or How hard is it to play the drums – and turns it into a well-researched, thoughtful essay. The writing is intensely British, as is the humor (I think it’s British humor), and he doesn’t throw anyone under the tour bus. That’s the good news. The less happy side is that Bruford is a tortured artist; much of the book deals with his insecurities about his talent, his musicianship, and his creativity. In Neil Peart’s Road Show, you read about on-the-job concerns that are particular to touring musicians but not all that hard to believe: slightly dangerous but over-enthusiastic fans or missed cues within imperfect performances. Peart is a drummer who enjoys drumming and lovingly refers to his bandmates as “the guys from the office;” Bruford’s book left me feeling that he approached his music like a semi-regular trip to a moveable office. By Chapter 19, Bruford’s drums are Dilbert’s cubicle, equipped with ride cymbals and a sense of dread. Bruford relates his appearance on Peart’s “Burning for Buddy” tribute with the sense that he couldn’t wait for his two hours of big band time to hit the shout chorus.

It’s a book worth reading, espececially if you like prog rock and the Canterbury centered groups (Egg, Gong, Hatfield and the North) or ever wondered what Robert Fripp is like as a band mate. You’ll listen to “Close to the Edge” with new appreciation for how it was written and recorded, and wonder why Bruford can’t be equally amazed at his own musical accomplishments.

Pierre was the one coach that everybody loved. I really do mean everybody – players, parents, other coaches, the NJ Devils Youth Hockey board, refs, the Zamboni guy. It was impossible not to like him, with his outsized love of hockey and his innate ability to share that love. The players he coached in their single-digit years invited him back to their club as adults, so they could coach with him. There is no better statement about the quality of a coach’s character on and off the ice.

Pierre was fair, he was right, he instructed solidly and he had standards. He showed up and expected his players to do the same, whether they were 8 or 18 years old. He was “old school” in the sense that he valued hard work and simple drills that reinforced that work ethic. During one practice with my son’s bantam team (Pierre wasn’t our regular coach, he was merely helping out when needed) he was working on a breakout drill that involved skating outside of the faceoff dots. Kids were cheating through the middle so he stopped the drill, conveyed some wisdom in that Swiss-infused English that gave him enormous gravitas, got a few laughs, and then had the drill run correctly. No screaming, no throwing sticks, no tests of mettle or attitude on either side. When he blew the whistle, I think most players were secretly happy – anticipating – to see what he would share.

I think about Pierre nearly every week that I play with my adult league team. Moving slowly, I have a few extra seconds to think about my positioning on the ice, and I hear him instructing (not shouting) “Triangle!! Triangle!! Tri-ang-u-lation!!” It was his most valuable lesson, taught to PeeWees learning puck control and cycling: keep your forwards in a triangle around the net, move the puck, and move the players to maintain the triangle. The first rule of hockey – create space without the puck, create time by moving with it – conveyed using the simplest geometric shape, in a voice and style that 12 year olds visualized and committed to memory (most of them, at least). Six years later, I still hear echos of that coaching session; following sing-songy words that keep me from over-skating and passing out from exhaustion. Good advice transcends space and a lot of time.

With all of the negative press and horrifying stories about amateur athletics and youth sports, it’s critical to have role models and men like Pierre Pellaton. We all wish we could skate with him another season.

1. Nathan Rapoport’s Scroll of Fire sculpture was the first sight I visited on my first trip to Israel in 1989. The part of the sculpture that resonated with me was the menorah representing the reunification of Jerusalem, the converse of the Arch of Titus in which Roman soldiers are carrying the same precious (in every sense) metal menorah away from the Second Temple (in the year 70) as a spoil of war. The long-standing history of the Jewish people in a piece of metal, carried out and symbolically returned.

2. Fast forward a few days – we had many discussions with local political leaders, those establishing new development towns, and homeowners who were required by law to build bomb-proof safe rooms, about “security.” It’s a term we toss around quite loosely in the States: we have home alarm systems, we lock our cars, we park in well-lit spaces and we affix “safely” to our wishes for driving, flying or even participating in weekend sports, all to build a sense of security from some well-understood threats of theft or recklessness. The Negev counterpoint: five or six times a month, a Qassam rocket carrying 20 to 40 pounds of explosives is fired from Gaza.

A rocket-proof bus shelter, donated through Operation Lifeshield.

And now the story….

While we were walking around the Turkish fort in Ofaqim park, we heard a rocket launch siren. Without a single syllable of raised voice, with a calm and collected demeanor that has to be experienced to be believed, our Israeli group member walked us around a fort wall so we’d be facing away from Gaza – the safest aspect without an appropriate shelter. He said quite simply “We have a few seconds, let’s go.” My body reacted in the way it does when you experience severe pain – first the adrenaline rush, my limbs moved in roughly the right way, and then my brain began to process the potential for danger and my heart was racing. It was a false alarm; we hopped back in our car and continued on our way within a few minutes.

The propulsion end of a small rocket that landed near Kibbutz Erez, now used to hold a tiki torch

One of our group introduced us to Yaron Bob, an Israeli artist who collects rockets that have fallen in the Negev and turns them into pieces of art. His business, Rockets Into Roses, returns half of its gross to the local communities to invest in shelters. Once a rocket has detonated, we were told, “it’s just metal.” That statement took on a new meaning after personally hearing a rocket warning siren. Yaron’s work has an intense, visceral feel to it – his flowers and candlesticks are beautiful objects that are equally heavy and dark. Each flower is a single piece of metal, cut, twisted, bent and rolled into art. Yaron turns attempted destruction into an intricate scroll forged with fire.

It’s more than just metal – the Hanukah menorah I purchased from Yaron reminds me of courage, strength, bravery and of my newest friends who stand tall on a daily basis.